Mary Delaney
Stephen Suen
We worked on a physical way of depicting the data from the water infographic. The amount of water used in the production of some foods as compared to others, especially in the production of steak immediately jumped out to us. However, we quickly realized that neither of us knew how much the 1,500 gallons of water necessary to produce a pound of beef actually was. After some quick calculations, we figured out that 7.5 gal is about equal to 1 cubic foot, meaning that 1,500 gallons of water is about the amount of water needed to fill at 25’-long lap pool. By contrast, the amount of water needed to produce one serving of chicken, is about a bathtub-full. To emphasize the huge amount of water necessary to produce a steak dinner as compared to a chicken one, we proposed having a bathtub and a lap pool next to each other to help people really understand how much water, in absolute terms, goes into a relatively small piece of meat.
